The pack house dining hall was alive with chatter that evening, but none of it reached me. My mind was still tangled in the fragments of questions I couldn’t shake.

The missing guard. The wine bottle. The stains I had found in the missing guard room no one bothered to clean.

All threads pulling at me, whispering of a truth buried deeper than the stone walls of this place.

I told myself I wouldn’t come tonight, that I could easily eat alone in my chamber. But the walls had been ...